Simply Wonderful Fun

NOTE: This is one of the many “chapter scraps” I wrote in parallel along with the Psychocandy book proposal for Continuum Publishing's 33 1/3 series.

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After digesting Psychocandy for several months circa ’87-’88, my friends and I became so enthralled with the waves of guitar fuzz and distortion on the album that we attempted to re-create it ourselves. Through an assortment of mostly pawn-shop music gear—a couple of crappy Peavey amps, a home-stereo EQ unit, a cheapo distortion pedal, a borrowed phaser, a Midiverb II digital processor and several cassette decks—we proceeded to overload the signal of my friend Tom’s rather elegant Rickenbacker guitar until it morphed into saturated white noise. Simply wonderful fun.

Incidentally, the tape deck portion of the audio chain was pure accidental genius, much how I surmised the Reid brothers stumbled across their own amazing guitar tones from the purchase of a dying Japanese-made fuzz pedal. Through trial and error, we figured out by sending the guitar signal to a cassette deck that had been put into “record-pause” mode, its preamplifier section would become activated. You could then use the level-controls on the recorder to further overdrive the guitar, and then route the audio out into yet another deck. Repeat several times and distort further.

The resulting noise certainly emulated the buzzing guitar sounds heard on Psychocandy—not to mention the wonderfully static-y tones found on Husker Du’s New Day Rising—and we spent numerous afternoons in Tom’s bedroom (and later in our college dorm) coming up with different combinations of textures in the pursuit of pure noise.

From a purely tactile and visceral sense, I felt an immediate connection to those Psychocandy guitars that made me want to try it myself. The DIY spirit of punk, indie rock and even DJ culture is empowered by listeners who become so passionate about the music that the next most logical step is to become an active participant, to make the transition from audience member to performer (bedroom, in my case).

In high school, I also tried my hand at audio production and became the de-facto sound engineer for the short-lived band I was in (uhh, “Life in General”). I still have those tapes, recorded live to two-track cassette in Dolby C with a Radio Shack stereo mike. They sound pretty damn good today, fidelity-wise of course. This was all just another direct extension of wanting to be closer to the music, wanting to move beyond the role of the passive listener ...